Announcing The Chess Gym
The training philosophy behind our new online chess community
If you asked me a few years ago, I would have said that nobody really knows how to get better at chess. But as I’ve worked with more students as a coach, and studied the habits of successful players and coaches, I’ve realized that there is a pretty strong consensus on what works. It’s just that almost no one does it.
There are three core activities that most strong players and coaches seem to agree are important:
Play serious games
Review your games
Solve challenging exercises
The people who do these three things consistently over a long period of time tend to improve and see their rating go up. The problem is, most people do not manage to stick with a good routine long enough to see the results. This happens for a variety of reasons:
Getting discouraged by bad results.
Getting complacent from good results.
Getting distracted by low value chess activities (constantly switching openings, playing huge amounts of bullet, watching videos passively, etc.)
Life responsibilities get in the way.
Whatever the reason, the plan gets derailed before it has a chance to work, and getting better starts to seem impossible.
For those reasons, when I started working on a chess community with Martin Justesen from the Saychess newsletter, we knew it shouldn’t be complicated. In fact, it should be as simple as possible, but it should help you create and maintain good habits.
We took inspiration from a gym. When you go to see a personal trainer, you don’t have to worry about planning which exercises you’ll do that day. You just have to show up. Similarly, we wanted to make it so you can bring your enthusiasm and love for chess, and we supply the resources, structure, and support of an effective training plan. That’s where the name The Chess Gym comes from.
So how do we actually accomplish that within the program? Let’s go through a few of the components.
Daily Position
What’s the simplest thing you can do every day to maintain a chess habit? I’d say it’s solving one exercise. Compared to playing a game, it’s much more manageable to schedule. You don’t have to find an opponent and you can plan to spend the same amount of time every day. We post one puzzle every day, so all you have to do is open the app and start solving. But unlike most online puzzles which focus only on tactics, we include a variety of positions: tactical, strategic, endgame, etc. so you work on all the skills you’ll need in a real chess game. Once you’re done, you can post your analysis and compare it to what other members came up with. There’s a lot of value in seeing how players of different levels think about a position and discussing it.
Weekly Sparring Game
We know that over-the-board chess is the gold standard for getting valuable experience, but OTB tournaments often require a multi-day commitment and are hard to schedule around other responsibilities. Slower online games are a great stand-in when you can’t make time for OTB, but those games are hard to find online. A big benefit of being part of an online community is you have access to other people who want to improve their chess with slower games. We encourage everyone to play one slow game a week with another Chess Gym member close to their level. Even more important, you can review the game in a postmortem session with your sparring partner to get more valuable lessons.
Weekly Solitaire Game
Solitaire Chess – playing through a game and trying to guess every move for one side – is one of my favorite training techniques as a player and coach. It makes a great complement to solving exercises. Exercises are great, but they tend to focus on critical positions. When you play real chess games, you also have to navigate all those in-between positions, where not much seems to be happening, and yet the flow of the game may be determined. Playing over whole games ensures you’ll see all the kinds of positions that occur throughout a game. It also exposes you to openings, ideas, and moves you wouldn’t see in your own games, expanding your chess imagination. Every week I select one game for Solitaire Chess and annotate every move. I share it as an interactive Lichess Study to make it easy to play through and guess every move.
If you’re ready to take control of your chess improvement in 2024, check it out!
Very cool! Love the focus too. I’ve been telling myself I’m going to Take Chess Seriously again, if I find the time I’ll join for sure.
I’m curious if there was any discussion of including simpler puzzles in some way, like a puzzle rush/storm/survival. Anecdotally they helped me a lot, more so than doing puzzles at the limits of my calculation. I play tennis and it sometimes feels like focusing on tough puzzles is the equivalent of practicing your down-the-line passing shot, which you should definitely practice and feel great to hit, but 90% of points are going to be decided by unforced errors, and most players would be better served by practicing easy baseline shots until they never miss.
Maybe a stretched analogy. Anyways, just curious what your thoughts are on easier puzzles in general, and then if that was a point of discussion at all for the gym.
What will be the minimum rating recommended for joining? The core activities, as described, will work well for intermediate and advanced players. Low-rating players may not be able to find a suitable partner for the weekly game or may not be able to contribute much in their analysis to the daily position. Asking for a friend (of course!).